The Three Obentos!

Let it be known that when you’re on a bento blogging hiatus and people start posting nasty comments about your slackass or your aunties fire up the coconut wireless wondering if you’re still alive, it’s probably time to pick up your good old WordPress pen and start writing again. I do apologize to everyone who entered my 500K Bento Contest. I can assure you all, I’m almost done judging all the entries.

My Vegas trip (which wasn’t for pleasure) ended up taking a mental toll on me and when I got back, Twilight was a nice escape from that. Then both my kids started new schools, a big life change came to stare me in the face, I started the KUT program, my eating habits changed drastically, a deadline for a bento side project woke up and bit me in the ass, and Square Enix released more Final Fantasy XIV news. As a result, I have three bentos to post today. You might say I have a plethora of bentos!

This is a bento I made last night. Baby Girl snacked on the way home from kindergarten and therefore did not eat dinner, so I packed it up and am making her eat it today. This will be the first bento she takes to school but unfortunately, thanks to her old preschool, she’s been instilled with some fear reaction to taking home lunch. When I asked her on the first day whether she wanted school lunch or bento, imagine my horror when she said, “I want school lunch, I don’t want to get scoldings.” Today, when I told her I’d packed her a bento, she snapped at me that she didn’t want it and I should just take it.

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I packed it in her bag in case she changed her mind and to my dismay, she got mad at me for doing it and demanded I take it out of her backpack. I guess after her preschool experience, she finds them embarrassing. I get that it’s not her fault that she feels like this and I’ll respect her wishes after today, but it still makes me annoyingly sad. I’ll go pout in a corner and give in to school lunches until she decides it’s ok. On the bright side, at least I’m off the hook for extra lunch making.

I’m pretty happy with everything in this bento except for the middle of the flower. It just looks out of place and I hate it. The monkey is filled halfway with furikake for her to sprinkle on the rice and cut up teriyaki hamburger patty. There are two strawberries and one lonely looking grape in with the other food.

This is another of my KUT bentos, which are basically protein (the shrimp), healthy carbs (the soy beans), and vegetables. I pan fried the shrimp in olive oil with garlic and a bit of salt and it came out tasting fantastic. I removed the soy beans and ate them on the side, then ripped up the lettuce and I had a nice shrimp salad. The shrimp was so tasy I didn’t need dressing.

I’d taken this for lunch on Buddy’s first day of school. When we had gone to orientation and they told us that one of us had to stay at school with him for 3 hours, I wasn’t very happy that it wasn’t optional. The school ended up providing all the new parents with the school lunch though, and it was very good and very healthy. They served chicken adobo with brown rice and I was very proud that my son gobbled up everything in no time while all the other kids sat there picking at their food, basically not eating. I ended up eating this one two days later.

This picture looks terrible because I was in a hurry and had to take it at lunch, where we have terrible lighting no matter where I put the bento. This is another KUT bento, with tofu stir-fry on the left and ingredients for a pita on the right. I’m participating in Foodbuzz’s Tastemaker program and their latest set of products for us to try out included several of Emeril Lagasse’s products. I used his Original Essence to flavor some turkey breast strips and although it’s good, I don’t think I put enough in. I brought a whole wheat pita separately and there’s salsa in the little dog cup. I removed the blueberries, then plopped the lettuce and turkey right into the pita and topped it with the salsa. That was quite yummy!

I hope to be able to tell everyone what my big side project is soon. It’s quite exciting!

Also, as an update to the kickboxing, when I weighed myself at the 2 week mark I’d lost nothing, which was pretty discouraging. But when I weighed myself this morning by chance, I found I’d suddenly dropped three pounds, so now I’m at 143.6! Whee!